OpenAI will not go public this year, CEO Sam Altman said in comments published by Fortune, adding that “right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public” given the amount of safety work the company still has ahead of it.
The remarks land at a tense moment for the AI industry's safety debate. Altman's comments followed the resignation of an Anthropic employee who issued a public warning about the pace of AI capability growth, a moment that appears to have rattled leadership across the sector rather than just at Anthropic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay the same weekend urging AI companies to deliberately slow how quickly they push out more capable models, and both Altman and Elon Musk signaled support for that approach — an unusual moment of public alignment between rivals who spend most of their time competing for the same talent and the same capital.
Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI may be close to announcing a joint pact among leading AI labs to coordinate on pacing capability releases and address safety risks collectively. Details of what such an agreement would actually bind the signatories to were not specified, and coordination among competitors on anything resembling development speed raises obvious antitrust questions that would need to be worked through before any formal pact could be announced. It also raises a more basic question of enforcement: a voluntary pledge to slow down carries little weight if any single lab can walk away from it the moment a competitor appears to be pulling ahead, and nothing in Altman's comments addressed how such a pact would be verified or policed.
The timing sets up an unusual divergence between OpenAI and its closest rival. Fortune reported that Anthropic is on a different path entirely: Reuters has separately reported the company is expected to begin marketing its own public offering as soon as mid-October, ahead of November's U.S. midterm elections, in what would be one of the largest IPOs in tech history. That Anthropic is racing toward a listing while publicly championing a slower pace of capability development, and OpenAI is doing the opposite — pausing its listing while its CEO talks up coordination on safety — captures how unsettled the industry's own read on urgency versus caution still is.
Related: Altman Backs Amodei's Call to Slow Down AI Development Pace
For markets, an OpenAI IPO has been treated as one of the defining catalysts of the AI cycle, given the company's outsized valuation and its position at the center of the current infrastructure buildout. A delay removes a major listing from the calendar that investors, employees holding equity, and the broader venture ecosystem had been anticipating, and it follows a pattern this year of AI companies moving cautiously around public listings even as private valuations keep climbing. Nvidia has reportedly been in talks to anchor Anthropic's IPO with a $10 billion commitment, underscoring how much capital is already positioning around whichever AI lab lists first.
Crypto and adjacent risk assets have increasingly traded in step with AI sentiment this year, as enthusiasm around AI infrastructure spending has become one of the dominant narratives pulling capital into speculative assets broadly. A delay to the most anticipated IPO in tech, paired with two of the industry's most prominent CEOs publicly discussing slowing down rather than accelerating, is the kind of sentiment shift that tends to ripple into how aggressively investors are willing to price risk elsewhere — crypto markets included.
Whether the proposed industry pact on pacing capability releases actually materializes, or whether it fades the way similar coordination proposals have in the past, will likely say more about the next year of AI development than the IPO delay itself. For now, OpenAI's timeline has shifted, and the market is left to reprice around Anthropic's own record-setting listing plans instead, against a backdrop where Wall Street's earnings forecasts are already leaning heavily on the AI boom continuing uninterrupted.
